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Rewriting Environmental Science
Aqua OS X writes to tell us CBS News is reporting that government scientist James Hansen recently spoke out against the White House in an appearance on 60 Minutes. From the article: "Hansen is arguably the world's leading researcher on global warming. He's the head of NASA's top institute studying the climate. But this imminent scientist tells correspondent Scott Pelley that the Bush administration is restricting who he can talk to and editing what he can say. Politicians, he says, are rewriting the science."
Is that better than eminent?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
When the Polynesians found Easter Island, they found a paradise. Seas teeming with porpoises, huge edible palm trees, bountiful flightless birds and tillable soil from coast to coast.
Unfortunately, they also brought rats with them on their canoes.
The rats ate the birds and bird eggs. The trees were cut down for timber and kindling. The land was farmed to exhaustion. And the entire civilization that arose there quickly collapsed under its own weight.
The whole time, people thought things would last forever, but they couldn't see the end coming.
We have our rats too.
until this story doesn't exist
Why is this under a "more-reasons-to-privitize" department? I'm all for private ventures going into space, but you're quite delusional if you expect there to be any large scale investment in global warming research by the private sector. Yes, I know there might be some exceptions, but privitization is not going to give us better research.
Better rockets, cheaper missions, maybe... but, in general, this sort of basic scientific research is *exactly* the sort of thing the government should be doing. Of course, in a perfect world, the government wouldn't be trying to stifle the scientists either...
Elrond, Duke of URL
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
Son, we live in a world that has myths, and those myths have to be guarded by men with guns. Whose gonna do it? You? You, PrinceAshitaka? The President has a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for the Big Bang Theory, and you curse the Baptists. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That the Theory's subversion, while tragic, probably saved souls. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves souls. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want us on that wall, you need us on that wall. We use words like God, Intelligent, Design. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very mythology that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a Bible, and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to.
The politicization of science is an important issue for science. Why don't you think this is a science story?
Quicktime
Or, you could actually -read- the article.
Specifically the parts that note he was permitted from discussing a number of things and he had to give the interview with a NASA watchdog recording and overseeing the interview.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
The links above don't work. Go here instead and click on the links.
The other important, if not newsworthy, quote was
An organization with a culture like that might be right about something someday, but only by coincidence.Actually, if not for immigration, most of the first world would already be in population decline. When people get reasonably comfortable, and childhood mortality is negligible, children are deferred and one or two are sufficent for most to satisfy their need for procreation. We've got one and that was enough for us.
I am all for listening to both sides of a story, but where did scientists worried about the future of the planet exactly do wrong? If someone except the politicians are to blame here, it is the sheep public who lets this happen. Or write posts like yours.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
If you want to cut birthrates, it's not the men who are going to have to swallow.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Not necessarily; Developed countries undergo population implosions.
Schools in Japan are shutting down in a wave, starting with the first grades, and then pushing onward through the school. Sometimes, they just shut down entire floors in their schools.
This is happening elsewhere, as well.
People are seriously freaked out about this.
The thing I find amusing, is that many environmentalists have problems with this.
In the 1990's, a bunch of environmentalists got together, and said, "What do we need to do? We need to seriously do something, so that people will be more environmentalist." The strategy, they decided on, was to mythologize environmentalism. That is, to get people to worship the Earth Mother, to shun technology, to get in psychic harmony with nature, and so on, and so forth.
And that strategy is totally being played out.
So when you tell them, "Hey, in Japan, they're freaking out, because people aren't having kids, and it seems to be because they're developed," it tends to not go over so well.
In Siberia, there is a forestry where the tress grows in pairs right next to each other.
While the common wisdom is that each individual trees need space around it to grow, the theory was that this was only true for capitalist trees. Rather than compete with each other for resources, socialist trees would cooperate for the common good.
Every official report from the forestry shows that the experiment was a great success.
With all due respect to James Hansen, the problem here is simple: just how many microseconds after scientists attempted to influence politics did you think it would take before politicians attempted to influence science?
We've seen it everywhere from the debate on Global Warming (where scientists have joined forces with ecologists to engage in massive social engineering in the form of the Kyoto accord) to the debate on evolutionary science (where fundamentalists attempted to redefine science with Intelligent Design) to the debate on gun control (where researchers have attempted to show a direct causal link between guns and crime) and pesticides (Alar, anyone?)
Now, whenever I see a news report on a political topic start quoting "scientists" or "researchers", I generally don't think "oh, good; a concerned scientist trying to weigh in on an important topic", but "whose special interest money is paying for this guy?"
It's hard to play in the mud and not get muddy yourself.
At first thought it might seem like the only way to limit the birthrate would be draconian or orwellian methods - nothing palatable to be sure. However, the truth is much simpler than that.
There is a long-observed direct corrolation between poverty and birth rate. Societies with greater poverty have higher birthrate. Even in China it's commom for city-dwellers to observe the 1-child rule, but poor farmers still have families of 6 or 7 simply because they need all the labor to help create an income. The same is true in the slums of Calcutta where children are needed to rifle through trash piles looking for recyclable goods. This happens across all the great poverty centers: Manilla, Bangkok, Mumbai, Calcutta, Nairobi, Cairo, etc.
Japan is a perfect example of the opposite. They have a NEGATIVE birthrate because the affluence of their society has led many to chose not to have children.
The solution to overpopulation will come hand-in-hand with our solution to many other injustices: great a fair distribution of resources and we'll be able to live sustainable on our planet.
World Changing - News for Humans, Stuff about our planet
Here in Holland, many times i see the same problem. Close to where i live, the government wants to build a highway to relieve congestion on a parallel highway. So they hired scientists to study the effects of the new road. It turned out the road would make things worse: instead of relieving the congestion on the other road, it would increase congestion on every other main road in the surroundings.
The scientists, knowing what would happen, leaked this result immediately to the press, but the final report got stowed away in a very deep drawer. Parliamant had a tough job to get the report out of this drawer again.
But. Then came the obligatory environmental impact study. In this study, the former report is completely ignored. The vast increase of congestion is not taken into account in an evironmental impact assessment!
If the politicians have it their way (and they must be quick, everyone knows they will get their asses kicked next elections) we'll have a road that increases the congestion, costs about a billion euro's of tax money and will terribly damage the environment and landscape. But the construction firms will be very happy.
Trust me, I work for the government.
The same four people also supported the thesis that the earth is round. This does not mean that the earth is flat. Just because evil people can see the obvious does not mean that the obvious isn't obvious. The earth has only so much stored energy; it receives only so much energy from the sun. The more people the energy has to be shared with, the less there is for each. The faster we use up the stored energy, the sooner we're forced back onto just the energy we get from the sun. That's just straightforward.
We cannot sustain our present rate of population increase; we probably cannot even sustain our present population indefinitly, once cheap energy runs out. This is obvious; so obvious that you don't need to be an evil genius to understand it.
What you may need to be an evil genius to do is to come up with a good solution, because this problem looks intractable in a free society.
There are indeed. Their names are Famine, Pestilence, Predation and Death. If we don't come up with a better solution, the Four Horsemen will be along shortly with one of their own.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Does poor science qualify? How about Michael Mann's Hockey Stick work? From this week's New Scientist (subscription only article)
Though McKitrick and MacIntyre's paper is hidden behind Nature's subscription firewall, McKitrick shows the graph on his webpage. Note that McKitrick and MacIntyre aren't saying global warming isn't happening, they're just pointing out Mann's method is suspect.The New Scientist article goes on to cite poor data sources such as tree rings with known variability issues and inherent bias in data selection. When Mann was asked to divulge his source code so it could be inspected for methodology errors, he declined saying it was proprietary code. Revealing methodology is inherent in good science and Mann violated that key precept.
You should be skeptical of climatology in general given that it's even more removed from model failure than meteorolgy. Meteorologists are well acquainted with their models failing because they get feedback on a daily basis. Climatologist don't get that feedback because there's only one climate so they retrofit their models to fit past performance of the climate - a methodology that meteorologists have demonstrated doesn't work very well.
Even worse, they can't even agree on what's going to happen. One model has Europe roasting, another freezing. It can't be both but regardless of which outcome we eventually encounter, climatologists will claim they predicted it.
At it's core, the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis has relied on CO2 emissions as being causative. You have to be skeptical of a claim that an incredibly complex atmosephere which we can't fully model is being driven by variations of a single gas. A gas whose concentration is less than a tenth of one percent.
Unfortunately, contrary to popular belief, planting trees is not a solution per se. The carbon cycle may slow down a little, but eventually, all the carbon in leafs and trunks will end up as CO2 in atmosphere again.
Dynamically, some of it is retained (new trees hopefuly grow, as old die and rot) in forests, but forest fires can dramatically change that.
Besides, some experimental research had shown that plants have upper limit on CO2 atmospheric concentration they can handle. After that limit is breached, photosinthesys stops...
The only direction is to think of a way to speed up sinking of CO2 to the bottom of the ocean rifts and back under the Earth's crust.
Out of the hat, it could go as follows:
- pressurise and liquidify air (first step in obtaining industrial nitrogen, too).
- do fractional evaporation of liquid air and extract the CO2 fraction.
- pump the taken out CO2 to the ocean bed.
or else:
- use fast growing algae to tie carbon into biomass. If nescessary, engineer the strain that can handle high concentration of CO2, then feed it with CO2- enriched (use gas centrifuges - CO2 is one of the heaviest components of air) air in controlled environment (hydroponics)
- harvest algae and carbonize them by anaerob baking in (i.e. solar) ovens.
- compress and burry or sink thus obtained charcoal.
but first: stop pumping natural carbon reserves into atmosphere (burning fossil fuels)! We don't need to stop using fire, but we must stop adding ancient carbon into short (atmosphere-biosphere) carbon cycle.
With all the recent advances in genetics, why can't we have an highly efficient single-cell photosynthetic lipid (oil) factory little friend? Put them in the glass tank, conduct light to the bottom of it using mirrors, let the little buggers swim down so that they don't get stuck in the oil layer forming on top of the tank, pump the CO2-enriched air thru the water (or do it separately, not to stirr the water) so that they have what to eat... and just let the oil pour from the top. Voila - diesel fuel at your disposal!
Sigh. No good deed goes unpunished.
Instead of just complaining about the bad spelling and grammar around here, I thought I would take a moment to show how it should have been done. There are a great many SD readers whose native language is not English. (Unfortunately they are learning the language from SD posts.) Not all of them, at least, would know about "sic".
As to your point, it doesn't matter where the submitter's italicized text came from; the relevant point is that it is verbatim and not the submitter's own writing. In such circumstances it is not pedantic to include "sic"; it is just good usage, colloquial or otherwise.
I don't know whether the submitter recognized the error or not. I'm really not convinced that it's obvious from the posting.
I do agree with you that the editor might have fixed it. The "editing" of Slashdot scarcely deserves the name.
Okay, okay, okay -- this sounds like McKitrick's bluster. I actually READ his book, I read his criticism of Mann's methodology, and I read a few rounds of responses. This doesn't make me educated on the subject, but it makes me more than educated enough to talk about McKitrick. His credentials on the subject are poor, his charges against Mann's work do not invalidate it, and having read his book, I cannot seriously believe that he is working in good faith.
There are valid criticisms of current climate science, and they are coming from within the scientific community, including the IPCC. The field of research is moving fast and the near-consensus from the people who know the most is that we're in trouble.
Did you read McKitrick's recommendations for climate science? Basically this: "Boy, math sure is hard, so let's all give it up and go home and have drinks with our friends." I really wish I was joking.
The documents were proven to be forgeries by Peter Tytell, proof of which was even included in CBS's own Thornburgh-Boccardi report. It's in Appendix 4.
The deferal of procreation is doing more to limit population, than the number of children is. When a couple has 2 kids by 20, then 4 grand kids by 40, then 8 great-grand kids by 80; then the population has increased by 14 people in the span of one generation, waiting till 35 increases the population by 6 people.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds